Mystery Achievement: Ambition and Depression

President Obama is to give a speech to schoolchildren.  One of the passages  quoted in a Guardian article caught my attention.

He also references Harry Potter author, JK Rowling, and basketball legend Michael Jordan. "Some of the most successful people in the world are the ones who've had the most failures," he will say. "JK Rowling's first Harry Potter book was rejected 12 times before it was finally published. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, and he lost hundreds of games and missed thousands of shots during his career. But he once said, 'I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.'"

The problem I have with this is that there are many aspiring authors and basketball players out there.  Most of them will never be published or play a single game in the NBA.  No matter how hard they work, if they keep trying, they will keep failing. 

That's not pessimism speaking; it's statistics.  

Obama is right that highly successful people often had to overcome numerous setbacks and even failures along the way.  But so did everyone who ended up not making it in their desired field.  How do you know who you are? How do you know when to quit?

The Economist recently had an article on the relationship between goals and depression. Recent research suggests

Mild depressive symptoms can therefore be seen as a natural part of dealing with failure in young adulthood. They set in when a goal is identified as unreachable and lead to a decline in motivation. In this period of low motivation, energy is saved and new goals can be found. If this mechanism does not function properly, though, severe depression can be the consequence.

So persistent pursuit of one's "dreams" may not be worth encouraging afterall. Of course no one ever got anything important done by giving up at the first obstacle. So we have to be good Bayesians. After enough failures, we give up.  Of course Harry Potter readers must be very happy that Rowling had such strong prior beliefs in her work. I wonder how she knew to persist.

 I can't resist closing with a favourite quote by Chrissie Hynde:

Mystery achievement, where's my sand beach?

I had my dreams like everybody else.

But they're out of reach. 

I said right out of reach.